Launch Open Source Pledge

[chadwhitacre]

We want to make it socially acceptable for companies to pay meaningful amounts of money to Open Source every year. We are soft-launched at 👉 osspledge.com.

Launch Timeline

Date	Milestone
September 15	Last day to lock in billboard logo placement for launch
October 7	Big marketing campaign kicks off, SF billboards, etc.

(kick-off call meeting notes)

To Do

• [x] pick a domain name
• [x] #9
• [x] #10
• [x] #8
• [x] #7
• [x] #6
• [x] #37
• [ ] #5
• [ ] #11

Inspo

1. https://pledge1percent.org/
2. https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-for-open-source/
3. https://givingpledge.org/about
4. https://www.theclimatepledge.com/
5. https://www.cos.io/initiatives/top-guidelines
6. https://uberpython.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/the-python-3-wall-of-shame/
7. https://sso.tax/
8. https://stripe.com/climate
9. https://fossunited.org/foss-pledge
10. https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward ← design inspo; also ... member?
11. https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/
12. https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/
13. https://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/
14. https://www.founderspledge.com/

[chadwhitacre]

Here are the things a company can do to support Open Source:

• pay cash
• dedicate employee time to upstream
• publish projects (~= employee time)
• give gifts-in-kind

What is in-scope for Pledge? Cash only or all or some or ... ? 🤔

[chadwhitacre]

What's the outcome we're trying to drive? Healthy Open Source (who didn't like "healthy"? I forget).

Balance user freedom and developer sustainability. Balance innovation and stability. Balance corporate and indie.

[chadwhitacre]

The Salesforce 1% model is time, product, and equity (financial resources).

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

Pledge 1% - The CEO Equity Playbook v_1.pdf

Pledge 1% - The Companion Guide to the CEO Equity Playbook v_1.pdf

[chadwhitacre]

Sigh. PDFs were gated. 😭

[chadwhitacre]

Note that we can only accept pledges from founders or executives who have the ability to make a decision on behalf of their company.

https://info.pledge1percent.org/pledgenow

[chadwhitacre]

Staff:

1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-lesnick-315910/ (CEO/President)
2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellefifis/ (Community Manager)
3. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesliegildea/ (VP, Business Development)
4. https://www.linkedin.com/in/minyoo/ (Sr. Director of Marketing and Communications)
5. https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciamschmidt/ (VP. Member Impact)
6. https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-antonio-barroso-1ba387130/ (Chief of Staff to the CEO)
7. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ella-jennine-hart/ (Executive Assistant)
8. https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandra-parra-74b75231/ (Operations Manager)
9. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynsatcher/ (Director of Equity Operations )

Charity Navigator - "Not currently rated" shrug

[chadwhitacre]

I propose that we need to reframe this initiative in order to drive the outcomes we want.

Outcomes

Let's talk outcomes. We want to change the status quo. Right now the status quo is some companies give some amounts, we don't really have great visibility, but we know it's not enough to really move the needle. What needle? Here's the needle: anyone who makes widely used OSS can get paid fairly without jumping through hoops.

What we want is lots of high-quality Open Source software, year after year, without chewing people up. What we need is better economic incentives. What happens now is we get idealistic flare-ups that wither and die. We have a sputtering engine, with spark and oxygen but not enough fuel. We need more fuel.

There's three parties:

1. corporate consumers (e.g., Sentry)
2. foundation stewards (CRA is solidifying this role, btw)
3. IC FOSS devs

The point of the Pledge is to unlock flow from (1) to (3) likely via (2).

Possibilities

Here's an outcome: a dozen companies Sentry's size also giving $500k/year 18 months from now.

Here's an outcome: $1 billion flowing through FOSS foundations 10 years from now.

Here's an outcome: 5,000 devs employed full-time through FOSS foundations 10 years from now.

Here's an outcome: 5 years from now there is a real pathway for any JS, Python, or Rust dev to produce widely used software and get paid fairly without jumping through hoops.

Pledge is the Wrong Framing

The more I look at Pledge 1% as an example, the more I think it's the wrong benchmark for comparison, and that "pledge" in general is the wrong framing. Here are four reasons why it is so weak.

1. No Impact

I can't tell anything from Pledge 1%'s homepage about their real impact. It's all social validation signals with no substance—basically what we have today with FOSS Funders but 10 years further along (~10 staff and ~1000s of logos vs. side quest and 15 logos plus two names without logos).

I find this buried in a FAQ:

Over 18,000 members in over 130 countries have used Pledge 1%’s flexible framework to ignite half a billion dollars in new philanthropy.

$500,000,000 / 18,000 members = $28,000 per member, and the org has been around for a decade, so that's $2,800 annually per company. Maybe they have a better story but if so I would expect them to tell it.

2. No Focus

There are four ways to participate and they are not equal or even really comparable: equity, time, product, profit. From what I can tell, any company with a volunteer allowance can say they have "Pledged 1%." Weak sauce.

3. No Accountability

From the FAQ:

Do you audit our commitment? Do we have to report on it?

No. Our goal is to supply you with the tools you need to maintain and track your impact programs for your company. We do not formally audit or require reports to participate. We will reach out on a regular basis to better understand the impact of our community as well as to surface best practices that can be shared or common challenges that can be collectively tackled.

This is in the nature of a "pledge"—a promise to follow through in the future. Also in the FAQ: "Taking the pledge is setting your intent to give, even if that’s at a later date." Does anyone follow through? Does anyone care? With Sentry's FOSS funding program I've been very intentional about promoting it in the past tense, "We just gave":

• 2021 - "We Just Gave $154,999.89 to Open Source Maintainers"
• 2022 - "We Just Gave $260,028 to Open Source Maintainers"
• 2023 - "We Just Gave $500,000 to Open Source Maintainers"

4. No Meaning

Pledge 1% has a wall of 1000s of logos—eight walls. The logos link to corporate homepages, not to any sort of detail page. I have no idea what it means that, e.g., Adobe is part of Pledge 1%. Are they giving 1% of their equity to charity? One percent of their revenue? Or—more likely—do they have a corporate volunteering allowance that allows them to say they are donating 1% of time whether or not any employees even use the program? Sentry has the same, and I wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member. Or, since, "[t]aking the pledge is setting your intent to give," does Adobe simply intend to set up a volunteer allowance, "at a later date"? Or maybe they intend to give not just 1% of their profits, but 10%! Maybe they intend to give 100%! 🙄

Bonus Reason: This Ain't Charity

Open Source is a restaurant, not a soup kitchen. Pledge 1% is philanthropy. We need voluntary taxation.

Frontier Climate is a Much Better Model

Mike Fix is an engineer on Stripe Climate and also Stripe's Head of Open Source. I've been talking with him about how parallel the problem domains and therefore solutions are, between Climate and Open Source. Essentially what Stripe Climate is banking on for long-term, truly transformative success, is that governments will eventually enforce carbon offsets. Through Frontier Climate they are seeding a market now in order to be ready then. They are skating ahead of the puck. The way they are seeding the market is with companies who essentially voluntarily tax themselves for brand marketing purposes on the one side, in order to grow an ecosystem of providers on the other side. The providers need time to mature before they are ready to handle the volume of demand that regulation would bring.

Sound familiar?

Frontier's portfolio of carbon-removal companies in the Climate case is akin to FOSS foundations in the Open Source context. Expected (and, presumably, lobbied for) government carbon offset regulation has a parallel in the CRA and related legislation. Today's FOSS foundations are not up to the task of properly managing 100x their current budget in order to efficiently provision Open Source into the future. It will take time to get there. Companies like Sentry are the innovators and early adopters who are willing to pay out of enlightened self-interest, recognizing the brand benefits of being a leading player. To truly succeed we will need to see early and late majority follow suit, for more mundane reasons, up to and including government intervention.

Here are things that Frontier Climate has going for them that we should learn from.

1. Impact

Look how Frontier clearly communicates impact directly on the Portfolio page and on a dedicated Progress page (the main stat to notice is that the portfolio delivered its first 1,716 tons of carbon this past year).

2. Focus

Frontier does one thing: carbon removal. It does it through multiple "pathways," but they all roll up to the single unit of measurement.

3. Accountability

Frontier is creating a market. In the long run, market dynamics will provide accountability. Companies that deliver on carbon removal will win, and those that don't will lose. The seeds of this are planted on their Portfolio page, where companies are compared in terms of a single unit, tons of carbon, both contracted and delivered.

4. Meaning

Membership in Frontier is elite. There are nine logos, not thousands. "Members make large, multi-year purchase commitments directly with Frontier," but, at the same time, participation includes "tens of thousands of businesses using Stripe Climate."

My Point

My main point right now is that we will achieve better outcomes if we drop Pledge as our framing and adopt Frontier Climate as our model instead. I've sketched out some of what this would look like above. Do I have buy-in to push further?

[chadwhitacre]

Had an internal call, agreements:

1. Outcome is a dozen companies Sentry's size also giving $500k/year 18 months from now.
2. Name is Pledge. It fits from a marketing perspective, doesn't couple us to specific implementation.
3. Focus is cash to indie OSS. Other things (time, product) are fine but cash is core to this
4. Benchmark is $/dev. It's easy to reason about, and causes less friction for private companies who will be the bulk for the foreseeable future. Also builds on existing narrative.
5. Open, light-weight reporting. Accountability, yes, but no heavy auditing (no staff).

[chadwhitacre]

Moving to https://github.com/opensourcepledge/opensourcepledge.com/issues.

[chadwhitacre]

The heart of this is going to be light-weight reporting on a) number of devs and b) dollars given to Open Source, in some consistent format. I think my next step here is to go through this exercise for Sentry and use that to generate a specific proposal for a format to run by others listening in.

[LewisJEllis]

Some quick thoughts to share:

• I really like the lightweight simplified approach, $1k/dev/year rule of thumb is very straightforward
• As an IC who likes open source and would try to get the org I work for to Do The Thing, I could benefit from:
  • A "How To Convince Your Boss / Management" spiel - how can an org / company value it past "seems like the right thing to do"? branding, marketing, more appealing place to work, sustaining commons, etc
  • A walkthrough of what to do / how to actually do it - say I have approval to distribute a pile of cash, now what? thanks.dev, GitHub sponsors, etc
• I suspect a lot of startups might worry "are my investors gonna think I'm just lighting their money on fire?", and so would be happier/less hesitant to jump on this if they could see VCs saying "this is cool and we support it and you should do it"
  • I imagine VCs who invest in/adjacent to open source would be happy to help provide support / social proof here
• A "who's doing it and how much" page / leaderboard could also be great, as exposure / recognition for participating companies, and as social proof for companies considering it
  • This also pushes the "no excuses, put your money where your mouth is" etc angle that I've seen Cramer express

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for jumping in @LewisJEllis.

• A "who's doing it and how much" page / leaderboard could also be great, as exposure / recognition for participating companies, and as social proof for companies considering it
  • This also pushes the "no excuses, put your money where your mouth is" etc angle that I've seen Cramer express

☝️ This right here is like the whole thing. It's all about trying to build social pressure / proof / validation, see how far we can get with it. We might need government to finish the job but we should be able to make a solid start with brand marketing value for early adopters.

[nehzatarmin]

Thanks for jumping in @LewisJEllis.

• A "who's doing it and how much" page / leaderboard could also be great, as exposure / recognition for participating companies, and as social proof for companies considering it

  • This also pushes the "no excuses, put your money where your mouth is" etc angle that I've seen Cramer express

☝️ This right here is like the whole thing. It's all about trying to build social pressure / proof / validation, see how far we can get with it. We might need government to finish the job but we should be able to make a solid start with brand marketing value for early adopters.

Let me know if we can help in any way @chadwhitacre this is something we'd love to promote...

[chadwhitacre]

Talked to Neon, idea from them to partner with SafeBase (e.g.) to deliver OS Pledge attestations alongside other things like SOC2.

[chadwhitacre]

Talked to Clerk, positive vibe, gonna circle back when we're closer.

[nehzatarmin]

@chadwhitacre not sure if you've seen this on HN but we gave you guys a little mention :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905849

The positive feedback we're also getting for Sentry is consistent month on month as we get more maintainers come onboard

[chadwhitacre]

@selviano and I are on a call about this, we just signed for SF billboards in October(!), so we now have a deadline. I've split out three tickets for our high-level todo items (from the issue description):

• https://github.com/getsentry/osspledge.com/issues/6
• https://github.com/getsentry/osspledge.com/issues/5
• https://github.com/getsentry/osspledge.com/issues/7

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! @selviano and I met with design. I've added a few items to our todo.

[chadwhitacre]

We've spruced up the landing page a bit. Even though it's temporary, we wanted something a little less plain to aid with #5.

[stevekrouse]

This is awesome! I'm so in! I feel like we were all missing a reasonable, simple standard and this feels like it

[chadwhitacre]

Woo-hoo! Thanks for jumping in @stevekrouse!

For everyone on this thread: we are starting weekly calls to coordinate on recruiting and execution. Mondays at 10 AM US/Pacific. Drop me an email chadwhitacre@sentry.io or lmk here if you want in on the invite. Let's go! 🙌

[Delta456]

I don't have any company currently that can fund the initiative but I still want to help anyhow. I would love to get invited.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks @Delta456! I've added you to the invite (grabbed your email from your GH profile). 👍

[jmduke]

lets gooooooooooo

[usmanmusa1920]

All your comments are good, may we see a potential progress.

[patrick91]

I'm in as well! patrick.arminio@gmail.com

[chadwhitacre]

Awesome, thanks Patrick! Added. 👍

[zanieb]

Just want to note that Astral is in on this initiative — we've just announced an open source fund at ~$3000 per developer.

[chadwhitacre]

Woo-hoo! Welcome aboard, @zanieb! Congrats on shipping the Astral OSS Fund! 😍

[anehzat]

Just want to note that Astral is in on this initiative — we've just announced an open source fund at ~$3000 per developer.

This is great to see @zanieb bravo to the Astral team for their leadership in this space

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! We had our community organizing kick-off call, here are the notes. @selviano Can you share the recording? I believe it went to your drive.

tl;dr is that we organized into four working groups:

• storytelling - @selviano
• member outreach - @vladh
• maintainer outreach - @Ethan-Arrowood
• design / build / specifics - @chadwhitacre

Get in touch with the people specified if you would like to help with that aspect. Each point person should run their own team. I'll set up a weekly recurring call with @selviano @vladh @Ethan-Arrowood for overall steering. Oh! We also started a Discord, thanks to @Delta456. 😎

Thanks to everyone who joined! Lot of energy, lets go! 👐 💃

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the recording of the kick-off call, for posterity. 😌

[Delta456]

Meet link for the next weekly community call, Monday at 1:30 PM US/Eastern.

https://discord.gg/3nf82CbF?event=1268553119717916776

[chadwhitacre]

Action items from weekly steering call:

• @vladh and @chadwhitacre to onboard early adopter cohort
• @selviano to firm up Nasdaq commitment
• @chadwhitacre and @Ethan-Arrowood to start planning an ecosystem partners kick-off event
• @stevenplewis to update design

Goal is next week to be ready to add a leaderboard to the homepage.

[pepicrft]

This is a fantastic idea.

[chadwhitacre]

I added "must have" and "nice to have" labels to our tickets and updated the ticket description here. I'm meeting tomorrow with the project manager for Sentry's design team to make sure we're in a good spot. My top priority is landing #45 to unblock #5.

[chadwhitacre]

We are four weeks out from our big campaign launch on October 8! We currently have ten companies onboarded. 🎉

From here on out all of our basic systems are in place, we just need to keep executing and building momentum.

Goals for this week:

• promotion - follow up with ecosystem partners with a partner enablement package
• promotion - publish some version of the partner package on the website for self-serve help
• recruiting - keep emailing and recruiting
• recruiting - publish some self-serve docs on the website for how to help